‘Crazy Horses’: the story of The Osmonds’ unlikely hard rock album
By 1972, hard rock was having a moment in the spotlight. Black Sabbath had arguably birthed heavy metal at the start of the 1970s with their self-titled debut album and released Vol 4 in 1972 to further acclaim. Deep Purple also knocked out two stunning records that year, Machine Head and Made in Japan, while Alice Cooper earned success with the provocative powerhouse School’s Out in the same 12-month window. While all of these records can be hailed as game-changing releases in the genre from that year, we can’t forget the astounding hard rock-adjacent records from the likes of Wishbone Ash, Blue Öyster Cult and The Osmonds that 1972 also produced.
Hang on…The Osmonds? The teen idol family band from Utah who regularly graced the charts with their inoffensive bubblegum pop and squeaky-clean image? They released a hard rock album? Scoff all you want, but if you’re able to suspend your belief for a moment, then please understand that the same family that was responsible for the wholesome anti-drug anthem ‘One Bad Apple’ also had a dalliance with making an album of Zeppelin-esque rock ragers entitled Crazy Horses.
Granted, it isn’t a hard rock album from start to finish and still sees the band deliver a handful of pop ballads, but it goes inexplicably hard for a band that had always been associated with being family-friendly and appropriate to a fault. Their early hits were the sort of thing that was equally as pleasant to the ears of five-year-olds and grandparents alike, so for them to emerge at the height of the hard rock boom with an album laced with crunching riffs was a shock, to say the least.
It’s worth bearing in mind that earlier in 1972, the youngest and most shrill-voiced Osmond sibling, ‘Little’ Jimmy, had a hit with the saccharine ‘Long Haired Lover From Liverpool’ at the age of just nine years old. He might well have been wet behind the ears, but the previous success of his older siblings, who had been regulars on the Andy Williams Show during the 1960s, meant that Jimmy was set up for easy industry success. If the baby of the family could steamroll his way to the top of the charts, then surely the rest of the family were destined for good fortune with whatever move they made.
You might wonder whether a move like this was lab-manufactured success bait and whether a team of shrewd industry puppetmasters expertly manipulated the family into producing an album like Crazy Horses. However, from the opening riff of ‘Hold Her Tight’ that bears more than some resemblance to ‘Immigrant Song’, it’s quite easy to tell that despite their pristine appearance, the four brothers – Merrill, Alan, Wayne and Jay – who contributed to the record were being their authentic selves and thoroughly relishing the opportunity to rock out.
Merill Osmond explained to The Guardian in 2017 that the move towards this heavier sound was completely of their own volition. “All our songs were chosen for us by the record company,” he confessed. “But now, having been successful, we wanted to freak out and make our own music. We were rehearsing in a basement one day when Wayne started playing this heavy rock riff. I came up with a melody and Alan got the chords. Within an hour, we had the song ‘Crazy Horses’. This track was heavier than anything we’d ever done. When the label heard it, they said: ‘Guys, what on earth are you doing?’”
Their hard rock heroes were even fans of the record, and Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham reportedly once took his son, Jason, to see the group perform live and was bowled over by how accomplished they were. Led Zep would go on to invite the band on stage during a UK tour to sing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ alongside them on the basis of this, with Merrill declaring that after their cameo, “We hung out backstage and talked about how we really dug their entire music concept.”
‘Crazy Horses’ itself is perhaps the best-known cut from the album, and while it doesn’t present itself with the same sense of self-seriousness that Black Sabbath were exhibiting on their records, it’s an equally valid entry into the canon of hard rock as ‘Paranoid’ for how gritty it sounds, and even sits among Ozzy Osbourne‘s favourite rock songs of all time. There might be traces of The Beatles, The Kinks and The Hollies on songs such as ‘That’s My Girl’ and ‘And You Love Me’, but for every soft moment on the record, there’s a track like ‘Hey, Mr Taxi’ that sees the band shred and wail like the best of them.
There are elements of hard rock to be found on other albums from The Osmonds, like Phase III and The Plan, but Crazy Horses is without doubt the finest example of the good-natured group unleashing hell on record. It’s one of the most perplexing left-turns taken by a band, but one that works so emphatically due to how accomplished the songwriting and musicianship are. You might think it’s grossly uncool to like The Osmonds, but this album is proof that they were far more than meets the eye.
